Minimalism (music)

I

Introduction

Minimalism (music), an influential style of musical composition during the last half of the 20th century. It is based on extremely simple, or minimal, musical material, with a steady, even pulse, either fast or slow. The musical material is repeated for an extended time and gradually evolves. The style has a somewhat hypnotic effect and is easy to understand at first listening, which accounts in part for its popularity. Its simplicity, popularity with audiences, and commercial success have been derided by some music critics, but minimalism has played a leading role in recapturing interest in contemporary music. The major practitioners of minimal music are American composers Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and Terry Riley. Minimalism has also been called system music, process music, and repetitive music.

II

Evolution of Minimalism

Minimalism evolved in the United States. The experimental American composers John Cage and Harry Partch have been cited as father figures, and precedents for minimalism have been found in works as far apart as the organum of 12th-century French composer Pérotin, the prelude to Das Rheingold by 19th–century German composer Richard Wagner, and works by 20th-century French composer Erik Satie. But the influences behind it were non-Western: classical Indian music, Balinese gamelan music, and African drumming (see African Music).

The earliest exponent of minimalism is considered to be pioneering American composer and performer La Monte Young, who founded the group Theater of Eternal Music in 1962. Young wrote music with few pitches and with notes sustained for extended periods; his Trio in C (1958) is often cited as one of the first minimalist works. Terry Riley, who had performed with Young’s group, composed In C in 1964, a work with 53 short musical phrases based on the note C that can be played by many performers, on any instruments, and repeated any number of times. Philip Glass based Music in Similar Motion (1969) on short phrases, differing by the addition or subtraction of a single unit, that enter the music successively. Steve Reich experimented with multiple tape loops whose synchronization moves slowly out of phase in Come Out (1966). He applied the technique to instruments in Piano Phase (1967). His group, Steve Reich and Musicians, and Glass’s group, the Philip Glass Ensemble, developed the composers’ new compositions from the late 1960s on and toured widely. During the 1970s minimal works of ever-greater ambition appeared, such as Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians (1976).

By the 1980s American minimalism had largely left behind its early radical purity, encompassing opera in Glass’s Satyagraha (1980) and Nixon in China (1987) by composer John Adams, and the string quartet in Reich’s Different Trains (1988). It moved closer to mainstream music, with a richer harmonic palette in works such as Reich’s The Desert Music (1984) and Adams’s Harmonielehre (1985) and with polyrhythmic music (in which contrasting rhythms occur simultaneously) in Adams’s Chamber Symphony (1992). Adams was influenced by Riley and Reich.

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III

Later Stages of Minimalism

European composers began to embrace minimalism in the mid-1970s. In De Staat (The State, 1976), Dutch composer Louis Andriessen combined the American model with harsher harmonies. He influenced composers Michael Torke, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe in the United States, and Steve Martland in the United Kingdom. Works by the so-called holy minimalists, who are drawn to the simplicity of folk music and religious traditions, include Symphony No. 3 (1976) by Henryk Górecki of Poland, Passio (1982) by Arvo Pärt of Estonia, The Protecting Veil (1987) by John Tavener of the United Kingdom, and Bemoaned by the Wind (1988) by Giya Kancheli of the republic of Georgia.

By the 1990s most minimalist composers had moved on to less minimal styles, and music critics considered minimalism in its original formulation to be largely dead. It had, however, influenced a generation of musicians born in the 1940s and 1950s. Composers such as William Duckworth in the United States used aspects of minimalism—its steady beat or tonal harmonies (harmonies based on a specific key)—as a starting point for creating more complex works. Other composers, including Americans Mikel Rouse and Glenn Branca, added rhythmic complexity and the energy of rock. The musical styles of this generation were sometimes referred to as postminimalism.

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